Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research

Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific community's expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical standards for research methods commonly used in software engineering. These living documents, which should be continuously revised to reflect evolving consensus around research best practices, will improve research quality and make peer review more effective, reliable, transparent and fair.Comment: For the complete standards, supplements and other resources, see https://github.com/acmsigsoft/EmpiricalStandard

Discrete Meets Continuous, Again

This report collects some contributions about issues related to the notion of sampling invariance that has been introduced in [FR05, FR06], of which the present report can therefore be considered a follow-up and a complement. In particular: we compare the expressiveness of the language   ¡ TRIO against that of MTL (and MITL), by also showing a result about the expressiveness of non-strict temporal operators; we characterize behaviors of bounded variability and formulas that preserve the bounded variability requirement; we compare the notion of sampling invariance with that of digitization [HMP92]; we discuss how to describe the runs of a timed automata with   ¡ TRIO formulas; we provide an example of application of the sampling invariance techniques to a simple verification problem; we summarize several related works on the expressiveness, decidability, and complexity of formalisms that are somewhat related to the   ¡ TRI

Automated Verification of Dense-Time MTL Specifications via Discrete-Time Approximation

This paper presents a verification technique for dense-time MTL based on discretization. The technique reduces the validity problem of MTL formulas from dense to discrete time, through the notion of sampling invariance, introduced in previous work [13]. Since the reduction is from an undecidable problem to a decidable one, the technique is necessarily incomplete, so it fails to provide conclusive answers for some formulas. The paper discusses this shortcoming and hints at how it can be mitigated in practice. The verification technique has been implemented on top of the ℤot tool [19] for discrete-time bounded validity checking; the paper also reports on in-the-small experiments with the tool, which show some results that are promising in terms of performance